Setup WordPress with www in General -> Settings to get benefits of old links or does it matter?
-
Hello,
I looked through many other Q&A and couldn't find this answer exactly... We build all of our client's sites on WordPress which automatically assign the new websites with no www. at the beginning. Recently one of our customers was upset because his new site (non-www) had only 3 links to it and his old www.domain.com site had 548. Is the simplest way to fix this to go into the WordPress Settings -> General and just change the WordPress Address and Site Address to the www version? Does it even matter or does WordPress tell Google to look at both versions. We don't see any SERP impact by having the non-www version up, but if it is an easy fix to get the 548 link credit I'll take it!
Reason I'm concerned is I do see the difference in OSE and would prefer to have 548 links vs. 3 also!
Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks community!
-
Hi,
I would change the Wordpress settings and setup a 301 redirect from non-www to www using htaccess (if you're using Apache, see e.g. http://enarion.net/web/htaccess/redirect-www-and-no-www/ for instructions how to do this). Updating the sitemaps file and resubmitting it to Google Webmasters, and manually fetching the www-version of the website with the Google crawler in the webmaster tools would be my next steps. Google and the other bots will use this signals to update their databases.
Best regards,
Tobias
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO threats of moving from [.com.au] domain to [.com] domain for a 15yr old SAAS company.
Hey Guys. I work for a 15 yr old SAAS company which originally started with a country-specific [.com.au] domain and later got a [.com] domain as the business grew. The AU website has a DA:56 while the [.com] has as DA: 25. Now we are looking to have everything migrated to the [.com] domain. But, my concern is that we might lose the SEO value of the AU domain. I was wondering if anyone has any experience in this or recommend a case study on this topic. Thanks! Allan
Algorithm Updates | | allanhenryjohn0 -
Google search console: 404 and soft 404 without any back-links. Redirect needed?
Hi Moz community, We can see the 404 and soft 404 errors in Google web masters. Usually these are non-existing pages which are found somewhere on internet by Google. I can see some of these reported URLs don't have any back-links (checked on ahrefs tool). Do we need to redirect each and every link reported here or ignore or marked to be fixed? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Fresh backlinks vs old backlinks: A solid ranking factor?
Hi Moz community, Backlinks being a major ranking factor, do they must be very recent or fresh to make a ranking difference compared to the backlinks which are years old? We know usually fresh content ranks well, but I wonder how much the fresh/recent backlinks impact in rankings. Do the years old backlinks from related and reputed website have same impact on rankings? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Footer menu links: Header tags or list items?
Hi, I would like to know header tags (h5 or h6) or list items ( ) works better for footer menu links for the best linking structure. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
How do I control the "link-tree" part of the SERP results?
Hey Mozanarians 🙂 Is there a way to change the pages that are shown on the "link tree"? (e.g. see bellow picture)
Algorithm Updates | | DanielBernhardt
Lets say that I dont want the "career" page to show on the "link tree" can I do that? Thanks and lots of love!
Daniel Bernhardt BLo9KSr.jpg0 -
To link or redirect? That is the question.
I have a site that I don't really use any longer but still has some okay rankings. I'd like to take advantage of the links point to that site. Is it better to redirect that site to my new one or to just place a link on the homepage pointing to my new site?
Algorithm Updates | | JCurrier0 -
Google spitting out old data as new alerts
Am I just unlucky or are others seeing this too? I have several google alerts. For the past 6 months, google keeps sending crap along with good stuff. its a bit like their search results. There are three types of Alerts they send that I'm not impressed with. 1. Alerts that are from unintelligible splogs that take real news stories and rewrite them with unintelligible garbage that makes no sense at all. Sometimes, they serve up new alerts from the same splogs I saw several months ago, that I felt sure they would have zapped by now. 2. Old stories, that have been around for months. I just received one that was from January, from TechDirt, a big site that must get a huge amount of attention from google. 3. Irrelevant stories because they love to show how smart they are by splitting my alert keyword text into multiple words, but it gives useless results. This is the kind of stuff that crappy search engines like AltaVista used to do. Is google reverting to the childhood of search with all these changes?
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
How do blog comment/forum back links compare to editorial back links?
I know that Google prefers a varied back link profile, and so it's ideal to get both - but I wanted to know, are followed back links from blog comments, forum posts etc. (i.e. The low-hanging fruit) weighted significantly lower by Google than links appearing within the of a page, for example? If so, is it possible to quantify by how much?
Algorithm Updates | | ZakGottlieb710